As some of you may know from the tweets I’ve been posting for nearly 3 weeks now, I was invited to attend the very first edition of the JumpInCamp organized by Microsoft in April 2010.

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:
(more…)

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains. (more…)

Helgi, our lead on R&D has just been published on this years PHP Advent. In this article he looks at how web designers and developers currently interact, and offers some ways to improve the web design and development process.

The full post can be found here.

If you have ever used Python and Memcached, you probably have been looking for a library to connect to your Memcached server. And I’m sure you stumbled on the Tummy.com library which has basically no official online documentation.

(more…)

Anyone that goes to conferences knows that it’s nearly always the same people speaking. This is not bad, but this world is vast and the potential amount of decent speakers with very interesting subject and even more knowledgeable ideas is even greater.

In an attempt to identify the reasons why the speakers presence is so repetitive, I nailed it down to the diffidence factor. Today we were discussing about the community on IRC and the issue of low amount of new speakers came up again. So I’m bringing the idea back up to the surface

(more…)

On Friday evening we quietly announced on twitter a product that we’ve been working on for the last 10 months. FRAPI is an Open Source API framework that allows you to open up your existing web based application or legacy system to your own or third party developers.

FRAPI handles standard API things like authentication and data formatting, and speeds up the API development process — like the way ZF or Symfony for PHP, Django for Python, JQuery for JavaScript (or, I suppose even Ruby on Rails ;-p ), does for other technologies.

David Coallier put together a quick 5 minute screencast to show you how you can use FRAPI to start building your API. (more…)

The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.

What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!

To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at: (more…)

A number of people have asked me over the past few days how should one go about using jQuery Autocomplete but instead of using newline delimiters, with a URL that returns JSON data.

At first, I first had a hack that involved handling the “keyup” event myself then sending a request to a JSON URL, and then involve the “autocompleteArray” method from Autocomplete. It was a mess considering that the autocomplete method is already sending the value of your defined input to the server as a GET parameter. I was repeating the behavior of the function in order to receive a simple JSON array. I was unhappy, and felt it to be a very annoying solution because I wanted to take advantage of the internal caching system of jQuery Autocomplete.

So I decided to give a look at the code and came up with a much cleaner solution. I directly added a JSON option to the Autocomplete. So for anyone interested you can find the patch here: jQuery Autocomplete JSON patch.

(more…)

Introduction

A few weeks ago, Helgi and I attended PHP|Tek 2009 in Chicago, as both representatives of echolibre and The PEAR Group.

This post will briefly discuss the formation of a Recommended PHP Standards Group, as put forward by a meeting of PHP developers at the conference. As would be expected, a bit of controversy surrounds this proposal, but my hope would be that it would be accepted and grow within the global PHP community in the coming years.

As posted by Travis Swicegood, a group of community project representatives came together to discuss naming standards for PHP 5.3 and above. (I would like to take the opportunity to publicly thank the staff of the PHP|Tek conference for providing us with a large meeting room with little more than 2 hours notice).

(more…)

1

SELECT tasty FROM beers WHERE cold="very" AND price="free" GROUP BY nerds;

A few weeks ago I was talking to Mark Baker from MySQL AB about getting a MySQL meetup happening in Dublin. Meetups currently happen in London, San Fran, etc., and are an opportunity for local MySQL users to meet socially. Mark was very helpful, up to the point that he’s offered to fly himself and Ivan Zoratti for the inaugural meetup. They’ll give us a brief talk on MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster v7 and what the future holds for MySQL.

This event is a chance for you to engage in your community by meeting other Dublin web / MySQL developers, learn from shared experiences and to make some nerdy contacts.

The good people in the South William Bar have given us the use of their top floor for this informal event, which kicks off at 18:30 on Wednesday 24th June. Places are limited to 25 people. You can reserve your spot on eventbrite for free.

To help with the “community” part of it, we’re going to put some money behind the bar for some nice beers.

UPDATE (3rd June 2009) : This happy bunch of MySQL developers have registered to come along. We’ll be releasing a few more tickets a few days before the meetup.

Barry Alistair, Richard Bowden, Declan Boylan, Rory Browne, Paul Campbell, David Coallier, Ray Cregan, Barry Cronin, Darragh Curran, Stephen Curran, Laura Czajkowski, Bill de hÓra, Andrew Duffy, Ross Duggan, J.D. Fitz.Gerald, Eoghan Gaffney, David Gillen, Daniel Hunt, Piotr Jankowski, Eamon Leonard, Conor McDermottroe, John Moylan, Tomasz Muras, Shane O’Grady, Paul Phillips, Eduard Raos, Karen Thompson, Neil Turner